Close to Home
by ysubassoon
Summary: Based upon the Season 7 finale: "The problem for you has never been life's constant stops and starts—for you, it has been its stories unfinished and its stories un-begun."


**Close to Home**

It always confused you to hear people talk about beginnings and endings, fresh starts and clean slates. On one hand, they should make more sense to you than anyone. You've had more of both than anyone you know; among other things, you're an expert on ghosts now because you _were_ one until you were reborn back in Washington. Coming back that way was more painful than you'd ever imagined in all the seconds, minutes, days you dreamt of returning. It was like trying to stuff yourself back into a womb that didn't want you anymore, that maybe never wanted you. Nothing fits now. You used to wear your old life (before it was old) close to your skin, clinging to its comfort and strange routines. Now, no matter how much you wrap it around you, a draft or two always chills the distance between you and what it is you want. You were ephemeral in Paris, neither here nor gone, and now you are here, solid and fleshy and human and mortal again, always on the edge of dying, always on the verge of being born.

The problem for you has never been life's constant stops and starts—for you, it has been its stories unfinished and its stories un-begun. You have spent your whole life navigating the gap between never and almost without ever reaching anything in between. The things you never started, the plans you never formed, the steps you never took toward the life you wanted...the house you almost bought, the friends and family you almost stayed for, the love you almost had, the woman you almost were, bear down on your shoulders in equal measure.

Maybe there is no distance. Maybe never and almost are really the same.

You're going to have a lot of books to pack when you figure out where you're going next. Not too many, though. Your collection has always defied expectations because of its size; it was always much smaller than visitors to your house expected it to be. Collecting books was never your thing. You don't collect what you love. You love your books.

This is how you love: You find something you love and you try to hold onto it for as long as it will let you. You find it on a shelf somewhere, or tucked forgotten in the back of a store, or have it thrust into your hands in the middle of a crowded sidewalk or an airport. Something about it captures your attention, maybe something about the cover or something better you hope it might say inside. You bring it home, one hand clutching what you received it in, and the other pulling it close to your chest. When you think you're ready, you open it and begin to explore. Maybe you fall hard from the first sentence. Maybe, instead, it takes longer, and the little things you find to love increase your patience. Maybe you put it down and come back to it later. Maybe you fall asleep with it laying on your chest, or on the floor below where it once dangled from your fingers. Maybe you lose it a few times. Maybe you find it again. You eventually lose the dust jacket and bend your favorite pages and highlight your favorite parts and scribble what it's teaching you, what it's asking you to wonder, in all the margins. You love it until one or both of you falls apart because of too many bent pages, because of too much dust, because of broken bindings and loose and torn pages, or because your margin notes are becoming too crowded to read. Maybe when it falls apart, you find tape to hold it together until it can't anymore. This is how you love.

It's the fiction you always come back to. You return to it again and again, and the comfort of fiction stays with you. What you love about it, why it calms you, is that you always know at least part of it is a lie. Especially in Vonnegut. The most fantastic, unbelievable parts of his stories are the ones that are the most true. The parts that are ordinary are lies. This makes sense to you. The failures that accompany success make sense to you. Bouncing between all the parts of your life, never being sure of where you are or when, makes sense to you. You understand the smell of mustard gas and roses. In your bones you know that Kurt Vonnegut put those stories in his books because they were true. But there are other stories he tells that you can't believe: surviving war, surviving tragedy..._So it goes_, he writes, but you just can't make yourself believe it.

You didn't want to, and you didn't expect it, but something terrifying has happened: You fell in love. You fell in love with her and you have to leave. It's the scariest thing you've ever done, and you don't understand it. You're looking for reasons. You need an explanation for this that wouldn't take years to tell. The whys and hows and whens are too easy; you need becauses for this. You need answers. Maybe you fell in love with her because you have to leave. Maybe you have to leave because you fell in love with her.

Maybe you love JJ like you love your fiction. Maybe you love JJ, and the fiction collection grows. She loves you, too, immensely, with everything she has. She loves you as much as you love her. She just doesn't love like you love yet. Or she has another book she loves more. Either way, she loves you, and it's the fiction you always come back to.

She almost loved you like you love her. There were moments when you talked to her or held her or squeezed her shoulder or let her cry on yours that almost felt like the love you wanted. There were moments in Paris, when you would stay online for hours, playing Scrabble and hoping you weren't being greedy by wanting her to love you more than she did, when she was your lifeline to what was almost home. There were moments when you were in her house that almost felt like home, too, like it was your house and your family and you weren't visiting and you could stay for as long as you lived and the finest decorations in your home with her were made with crayons, paper, and love. And then he'd walk into the room, kiss her briefly, and ask you if you were staying for dinner with his arm around her waist and their son tugging on his pant leg. And you'd reach for your fiction, and tell them both that you would love to some other night, but you have plans already and you're going to be late. It's not really much of a lie. You don't have plans, but you want to, even though you are late for them by too many years.

It seems that home is a place you are destined to read about, a place others have that you can visit, but never stay. Loving JJ brought you as close to home as you will ever be, and because almost is never (even in fiction), what you almost had with her, in the end, was never yours to begin with. You have to leave behind the things that never ended and almost started, and let where you are be the place where you begin your new life, never- and almost-free.

This is how you love.

**A/N: If you enjoyed this story, please share it. If you have something to tell or ask me about it, I prefer that you leave a signed review so that I can write back. Thanks.**


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